A data center is a specialized facility that houses web sites and provides data serving and backup as well as other network-based services for subscribers. A data center in its most simple form may consist of a single facility that hosts all of the infrastructure equipment, such as networking and storage systems, redundant power supplies, and environmental controls. More sophisticated data centers are normally organizations spread throughout the world with subscriber support equipment located in various physical hosting facilities.
A data center switching architecture is used to provide subscribers and applications used by the subscribers with access to the web sites, data, and services housed in a data center. In some examples, the data center switching architecture comprises a multi-tiered architecture in which two or three tiers of Layer 2 switches are interconnected to aggregate data center traffic from servers and other devices in the data center to Layer 3 routers that communicate with other data centers or external networks. In other examples, the data center switching architecture may be flattened into a single tier of distributed access switches directly connected to one another across a fabric backplane to transmit traffic directly between servers, routers, and other devices connected to the access switches. The single tier fabric architecture can be managed as a single data center switch with distributed data and control planes across the components in the switch and a centralized management and configuration system.
Fibre Channel is a high-speed communications technology primarily used to interconnect storage systems and servers in a Storage Area Networks (SAN). Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a standard for encapsulating Fibre Channel traffic within Ethernet frames to transport Fibre Channel frames of the SAN over a data center network. In this way, the FCoE standard allows data center administrators to drastically reduce cabling among servers and storage systems and also permits server virtualization within the SAN. Fibre Channel technologies are described in “Fibre Channel Backbone-5 Rev. 2.00,” International Committee for Information Technology Standards, Jun. 4, 2009, which is incorporated herein by reference.